Freedom maximalist. Good vibes only.
Boulder, Colorado, USA, Earth
Joined March 2008
- Tweets151K
- Following2.7K
- Followers121K
- Likes354K
Pinned Tweet
Announcing hashsma.sh! 𝟘 𝟙 ❒ 🔨
Strengthen cryptography with AI.
Cryptography—both current and post-quantum cryptography—depends on hashes. SHA-256? SHA-3? BLAKE3? Nobody knows if they are secure. We're going to find out!
Come help accelerate scientific research!
HashSmash is an open science-acceleration project in collaboration with @yukonresearch, @eigenlabs, @projecteleven, and @ShieldedLabs.
Formal verification is cool and all… I’m not saying *not* to do formal verification, but I’m saying to do memory safety first.
So… is anyone running Filnix in production? github.com/mbrock/filnix/blo…
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
New: someone made a CashApp account in her name. She spent 3 nights in jail and now faces up to 6 years in prison
Amanda Smith was arrested because a scam led to a CashApp account in her name. But she says she didn't make it, and the data doesn't line up 404media.co/amanda-smith-ope…
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
🔥 "I don’t think privacy is a feature, and I don’t think it’s a niche. It’s the room a society needs to think, speak, associate, and change its mind. Any system people depend on for daily life should give them that room by default. That’s the standard I’ll hold our work to."
Yesterday the Zcash Foundation board named me Executive Director. Thank you to Alex for steady leadership through a tumultuous stretch, and to everyone who has reached out this week.
The job as I see it has two halves: 1) keep the infrastructure fast, secure, and boring. 2) make privacy something ordinary people use without having to think about it.
I don’t think privacy is a feature, and I don’t think it’s a niche. It’s the room a society needs to think, speak, associate, and change its mind. Any system people depend on for daily life should give them that room by default. That’s the standard I’ll hold our work to.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Zcash is a technology that preserves and expands human rights. It protects your financial privacy in the age of AI — the antidote to AI-fueled surveillance and tyranny.
My first interview with @cameron and @tyler.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The 2012 thesis: digital gold
1:46 Bitcoin’s missing feature: privacy
2:28 The first internet-native money
3:15 Why they seeded Zcash in 2016
4:47 Money has always been private
5:31 The true separation of money and state
6:20 Privacy: where the state ends and you begin
7:59 AI and quantum as accelerants
9:11 Bullish AI means bullish Zcash
9:27 Bitcoin’s place in a Zcash world
10:53 Zcash in 5–10 years
11:47 AI cycles, not halving cycles
13:37 The biggest infrastructure build-out ever
14:08 Valuing Zcash as a percentage of Bitcoin
14:54 Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin
16:04 Gold is abundant in space
17:27 Why start Cypherpunk
19:05 The coming war on privacy
19:55 Flock cameras and mass surveillance
22:18 The encryption wars: Zcash is HTTPS
23:47 Wrench attacks and public blockchains
25:10 “I have nothing to hide”
27:11 Einstein at the patent office
29:14 Self-censorship in academia
29:48 Privacy forces you to engage with ideas
30:41 Outro
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Q. When does the contest end?
It's one of hardest contest on earth, so it ends when we beat the last round or give up with no more ideas.
SHA-256 Each round is a boss. No one human in history has gotten past Boss Round 38 (20 years+).
This week Dariia Porechna @FutureDies with our help got Ai + Humans to Round 39 making history.
But we haven't found a way past Round 40 its a much harder boss. This is what we're researching 24 hours a day to find.
Blake is round 2 (Humans) vs round 2 (Ai+Humans) No improvement.
Poseidon is round 7? (Humans) vs round 21 (Ai+Humans) Massive Research and improvement. History Making and in my understand first of it's kind. We did this. Thank you for supporting the research work. solana:2Srf6mhufzWJKZ5nniVXgwamLmDJWXPQBmddJ1MMpump
How do we win? By Cont the research to prove it can't be done with this generation of Ai and Humans.
It's one of hardest contest on earth, so it ends when we beat the last round or give up with no more ideas.
#HashSmash @yukonresearch @Zooko's Very Hard contest. Remember this is Coop PvE contest, we're working together to try and stack our research to better humanity not to win a prize.
xitter.cf/FutureDies/status/2113…
SHA-256 is not broken, but its security margin lost 1 more round this year:
Last week I found a collision attack on reduced 39-round that improves prior art by over 30 bits and the first differential attack on that round better than generic search on @yukonresearch Hashsmash board.
The attack rests on the same method as prior art ePrint 2026/1120 with new insights that first 2 state words could remain free, allowing a critical condition at step 16 rebuilt as a claw-search problem rather than a probabilistic filter. Took days of watching SAT logs, burning cores and arguing with Claude on what's possible to get a result close to generic search.
Since my initial submission, other hashsmash participants sraiw, @cyberaxe, @privacymage, @lamb356_ and @geeknik pushed it down by over 6.5 bits, currently estimated at 118.15 bits. The tree of submissions is hard to follow, so I put the construction, insights and numbers into a blog and am working on detailed technical report.
It's fascinating to see an initial structural observation develop into an improvement in the reduced-round collision frontier within days. AI is now a real aid in cryptanalysis and open collaboration speeds it up.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
"On the recently proposed o(n log n) integer multiplication algorithm" by David Harvey web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~david…
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
The eMudhra incident is a striking illustration of the fundamental flaw in how SSL certificates work: every Certificate Authority is effectively empowered to vouch for every website on the planet.
That’s insane.
Hopefully the world eventually adopts a Bitcoin name system.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Today Boom unveils our first completed supersonic turbine core, a 2GW Superfactory, and—one more thing—the world's most advanced all-digital foundry to cast single crystal turbine blades and vanes
Hooray the long dry boring years of no new attacks on sha256 are over! (All 12 of them.)
SHA-256 is not broken, but its security margin lost 1 more round this year:
Last week I found a collision attack on reduced 39-round that improves prior art by over 30 bits and the first differential attack on that round better than generic search on @yukonresearch Hashsmash board.
The attack rests on the same method as prior art ePrint 2026/1120 with new insights that first 2 state words could remain free, allowing a critical condition at step 16 rebuilt as a claw-search problem rather than a probabilistic filter. Took days of watching SAT logs, burning cores and arguing with Claude on what's possible to get a result close to generic search.
Since my initial submission, other hashsmash participants sraiw, @cyberaxe, @privacymage, @lamb356_ and @geeknik pushed it down by over 6.5 bits, currently estimated at 118.15 bits. The tree of submissions is hard to follow, so I put the construction, insights and numbers into a blog and am working on detailed technical report.
It's fascinating to see an initial structural observation develop into an improvement in the reduced-round collision frontier within days. AI is now a real aid in cryptanalysis and open collaboration speeds it up.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
SHA-256 is not broken, but its security margin lost 1 more round this year:
Last week I found a collision attack on reduced 39-round that improves prior art by over 30 bits and the first differential attack on that round better than generic search on @yukonresearch Hashsmash board.
The attack rests on the same method as prior art ePrint 2026/1120 with new insights that first 2 state words could remain free, allowing a critical condition at step 16 rebuilt as a claw-search problem rather than a probabilistic filter. Took days of watching SAT logs, burning cores and arguing with Claude on what's possible to get a result close to generic search.
Since my initial submission, other hashsmash participants sraiw, @cyberaxe, @privacymage, @lamb356_ and @geeknik pushed it down by over 6.5 bits, currently estimated at 118.15 bits. The tree of submissions is hard to follow, so I put the construction, insights and numbers into a blog and am working on detailed technical report.
It's fascinating to see an initial structural observation develop into an improvement in the reduced-round collision frontier within days. AI is now a real aid in cryptanalysis and open collaboration speeds it up.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
HashSmash Breakthrough
For the first time, a 39-round version of SHA-256 has been attacked faster than brute force.
Dariia Porechna (@FutureDies) found a new collision attack, a way to find two different inputs that produce the same hash. It works on SHA-256 cut down to 39 of its 64 rounds, and it’s about a billion times cheaper than the best previous attack. Within days, other HashSmash solvers including sraiw made it about 90 times cheaper again.
Full SHA-256, which secures Bitcoin, is still safe. Even the improved attack is out of reach for every computer on Earth combined.
Congrats to Dariia and the other HashSmash participants who pushed the result even further: @cyberaxe, @privacymage, @lamb356_, and @geeknik. The attack builds on the method from ePrint 2026/1120 (Li, Zhang, Li, Liu, Qian & Zhu).
SHA-256 is not broken, but its security margin lost 1 more round this year:
Last week I found a collision attack on reduced 39-round that improves prior art by over 30 bits and the first differential attack on that round better than generic search on @yukonresearch Hashsmash board.
The attack rests on the same method as prior art ePrint 2026/1120 with new insights that first 2 state words could remain free, allowing a critical condition at step 16 rebuilt as a claw-search problem rather than a probabilistic filter. Took days of watching SAT logs, burning cores and arguing with Claude on what's possible to get a result close to generic search.
Since my initial submission, other hashsmash participants sraiw, @cyberaxe, @privacymage, @lamb356_ and @geeknik pushed it down by over 6.5 bits, currently estimated at 118.15 bits. The tree of submissions is hard to follow, so I put the construction, insights and numbers into a blog and am working on detailed technical report.
It's fascinating to see an initial structural observation develop into an improvement in the reduced-round collision frontier within days. AI is now a real aid in cryptanalysis and open collaboration speeds it up.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
The story so far: In the beginning the Web Server was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
I basically think that any highly predictable and highly reliable supply will prove better than “stablish-against-some-benchmark”, long-term.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Brotli works great in Fil-C.
I know that Fil-C isn’t as fast as Yolo-C yet. But is the perf worth the risk?
Ask yourself and think about it
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Quick reminder that every single vulnerability announced was already there and was only discovered by virtue of AI tool use. It's not like the AI invented new vulnerabilities, it simply exposed them - which is precisely what you do before you fix them.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
My novel is 80% done. Scifi, and character does hacking. To make it more realistic i started reading security newsletters, listened to @JackRhysider and stuff like that. Reality is so much more absurd I'm not sure I can actually use it. Readers would laugh that it's to easy.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
I would like to urge all software maintainers to try another actionable step, right now: go test if your software works with Fil-C! fil-c.org/ ⤵️